The Eighth Wonder of the World?

There's a scramble of marvels clamouring for the title of the eighth wonder of the world. Cambodia's Angkor Wat is wonderful - as is the Taj Mahal in India - but the Terracotta Warriors near Xi'an are right at the top of my list. Discovered in the 1970's, when a farmer digging a well found fragments of the first clay figure, the site was opened to the public only a few years before I first visited in the early 1980's. Of course, it's a mega tourist attraction nowadays: there were 80,000 visitors yesterday, the last day of the May holiday. It's fantastically well organised and managed - with a city of shops and restaurants clustered around the exit gate. But I felt a flutter in my heart when I saw the same huge hangar I saw 41 years ago - sheltering the same timeless treasures and their story. There are thought to be 8,000 warriors, with their weapons, horses and chariots, along with musicians, officials and even troupes of acrobats.

In case you're wondering - the clean and tidy look of many of the warriors in the photos above is the result of decades of restoration work. Only one figure - the kneeling archer - was found fully intact.

2,000 other warriors have been gently pieced back together. There are bound to be some glitches, because each is an individual, with an individual stance, expression and set of clothes and armour, but it's a valiant effort and gives you a real feel for the ambition of Quin Shi Huang, who declared himself the first Emperor of China, and built this amazing tomb complex to protect himself in the afterlife. After his death, the Quin rule collapsed very quickly and marauding forces raided the pits where the clay soldiers stood guard. Fires may have been started - there's some evidence of that - and the wooden ceilings came down: you can see that in the wavy roof timbers of the first picture below. For me, there's something very moving about seeing the broken soldiers and horses, fallen together, 2,000 years ago.

Qin Shi Huang was responsible for several innovations which are still relevant today. He oversaw the first version of the Great Wall of China. He created a massive national road system and unified China through a series of economic and political reforms. One of my favourite stories about him is that he built 270 palaces so that, each time he and his grand army conquered a rival state, he could transport their ruling families back to his capital and house the vanquished in replicas of palaces they had left behind! In the final hall, a handful of warriors have been lifted into eye-level glass cases and it is wonderful to get up-close. Katie fell in love with the general (whose bows and tassels show he won a lot of battles!) and we succumbed to the classic photo-memento to wrap up the day!